Ted's manifesto is a remarkable piece of analysis. It's his solutions that weren't really, uh, constructive.
Ted Kaczynski has died
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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#122The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye. After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
The notion that industrialization and modernity in general bring about feelings of profound alienation has a rich lineage of philosophy and storytelling going back to the dawn of the modern era.
Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas.
The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.
From the manifesto itself: "In order to attract attention to our ideas, we've had to kill people." Quoting from memory - may not be word for word. So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a marketing strategy.
That's interesting.
I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.
I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#125His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
Even if Ted Kaczynski is in the top .1% of people worth listening to, which I don't think he is, that means that there are millions of people with equally profound ideas. You should prioritze learning from those people first rather than one who resorted to violence as a means to spread his message.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#126Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#127Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age. Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian ana…
Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5].
If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].
All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon
[4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
[7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik
[8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429
[9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts: > 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men. > 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civi…
Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?
No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to disagree with them.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#129No mention of MKUltra, it doesn’t excuse his behavior but does explain why he may have been pushed over the edge.
You'd have a point if other subjects of MK-Ultra allowed a similar trajectory as Kaczynski. Were there other cases of self-destruction? I don't even know how many people were subjected to these experiments.
Charles Manson. Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#130It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
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